Emacs is an enormous investment but every time I'm forced to use another editor or IDE I'm reminded how much it pays off. Fundamentally, all Emacs does is treat

Emacs is an enormous investment but every time I'm forced to use another editor or IDE I'm reminded how much it pays off. Fundamentally, all Emacs does is treat the whole world as text. Everything from that point forward is about giving you (or allowing you to build) tools to manipulate text in a way that is natural and powerful for you. This doesn't sound particularly earth-shaking, but it really is. Think of a language like Ruby or especially Clojure, where there are a few core data structures, but many things that leverage them. This means that every time you learn part of the Ruby Array API, or a useful function to work on Clojure sequences, you get to use that _everywhere_. So all of Emacs' basic interactions (and they may seem weird to begin with but they're honestly just trying to save your wrists some pain) work everywhere. You can always trust your intuitive, spatial model of the thing you're looking at. Search backwards in a text file, find some text, select it, copy it, go back to the end and paste it. That works exactly the same in a shell. It works exactly the same in a database client. Or SSH'd into a server. Or replying to an email. Same gestures when entering commands, same gestures moving around in autocomplete popups. Everything you learn with Emacs (and later, everything you write with elisp), has a little incremental benefit to your power and productivity manipulating text. Except everything is text, and so it all multiplies together. For whatever reason, I've been trying VSCode on Windows the last couple of weeks, coming from an Emacs on Linux background. I cannot tell you how painful I find it, even after making a pretty good attempt to map all the keys correctly (snarky sidebar, sorry: every editor and IDE has really good Vim key bindings, but terrible Emacs support. I used to feel bad about this until I realised it was a sign that Vim people clearly didn't use Vim that much, whereas Emacs people never leave Emacs). But VSCode begins at a completely different level of abstraction to Emacs. It doesn't want to show you a text-based UI everywhere, and implement tools to manipulate text. It wants to show you windows and panels and configuration screens and extensions with their own behaviour. Everything is modal and different, some windows are special, and you can't just navigate around the same way everywhere. So, sure, this isn't for everyone, but it's what I love about Emacs, to the point that the many regular indignities it forces on you (hangs if you're not careful about large files, abysmal performance of various things on Windows because of the overhead of starting processes, and sure, the learning curve for some people) are bearable because everything is so natural.